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Give a narrative of the three people that you observed and interviewed. Don't use their names. Don't identify the users by name, but do describe who they were. Each narrative should include a particularly interesting moment -- a breakdown or workaround that exhibits a feature of the problem you're aiming to solve.
Music Directors
Music Director D. Don (Americana/Roots):
Role: Receives music from the bin and logs them in the log books. Sometimes decides that something is a keep at this point. Files music in the new bins and comes to flush perhaps once a month, removing them. Currently receives digital media, but except for specific high-priority tracks, does not even bother downloading them, let alone playing. Does not usually burn CDs of digital media for playback in the studio, so digital media is often lost.
- The library is currently The music library is completely made up of physical CDs. - Currently, he Don receives about 5-20 CDs every week that he has to rip and enter into the library. - He gets also receives a lot of digital media as well, but most just of it get's thrown away. Occasionally, he will play them right away and pick out the good ones to burn on the CD.
- Most of the time, he needs to find time to preview the music tracks before burning them.
- Because of physical space constraints, they often flush out music CDs which receive less airplay, Only if something received digitally is especially high priority (something they're expecting or know is good) will he burn it to CD and manually put it in the library. In these cases, he usually previews the music tracks by playing them before burning. The studio is running into physical space constraints, so they're often forced to "flush" the albums which receive less airplay. About 10% of the flushed CDs come back to the regular racksshelves, the rest get thrown out.
If Don burns a - After burning the CD, he must has to manually insert the liner sheet (with track listings etc.)
- Sometimes this process comes extremely tedious, as the track information is not properly embedded in the music files (track name will say “Track 1, Track 2, Track 3 …”)
- It might also help to have the “digital liner notes” or a PDF/image of the album information stored in digital form
- Categorization of music is problematic, sometimes music fits into two categories (then two listing and so forth). Sometimes the process is tedious, since the music files will come named as "Track 1, Track 2, etc." and so he has to hunt down the track names. Don thinks it might be useful to preserve some of the aesthetic and non-critical parts of the media (like image of the album, other album information) as well. The categorization of music can sometimes be problematic, since multiple physical copies need to be made , one for each category) or into a category that doesn't yet exist
- The music director makes the call as to which category a CD get’s put into
for music that fits into multiple categories, and then filed into their respective genre locations on the shelves.
The decision on how to categorize an album is decided upon by the music director. - The process of getting digital music looks something like: download the music -> burn to disc -> print out track list -> put into physical format involves downloading the music, burning it to disc, printing out the track list, and putting it on the new release rack (for Doug . For Don in particular, he also writes an entry into his logbook , which prevents to prevent duplicate CDs from being filed)- . CDs are often flagged with some physical sticker (for example, if it’s going to get flushed soon)- Doug often stickers, for example a sticker that says this CD should get flushed soon. Don likes to play music on from his home computer, and he would like to be able to access use the system from there, so remote access is a plus for him- Doug . Don would also like to store the highest quality music possible music on the system, that is, if possible in , preferably a lossless format like FLAC . MP3 is (MP3s are at the low-end of the quality scale).
Lessons Learned:
- The entire playback library is currently physical
- Space constraints force them to throw out a lot of CDs
- May be helpful to keep non-critical parts of albums (e.g. album art, digital liner notes)
- Music that ends up in multiple categories has to be physically duplicated
- A logbook which he writes in is the safeguard against filing the same CD twice
- Remote access is a plus for Don
Music Director B. (Folk):
Role: Receives and logs new music, but completely ignores digital submissions right away. Is willing to use a system if learnable.
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- Trackblaster is a way to see all the DJs and how many times they’ve played each track, but not all DJs use it
Music Director Jocelyn (Loud Rock):
Jocelyn is loud rock music director at WMBR. She plays anything from punk rock to metal to garage rock. When she receives music in her e-mail, she'll only download it if she knows it will be something she likes. She's quite lazy in this respect, and often deletes the e-mails with music. She receives about 5-20 CDs per week, and wonders if we transition to digital, where all the fun information (like cover art and backstory) will go. Jocelyn thinks the essentials are album label, year, track list, artist. One of her duties is to perform the CMJ reporting for which albums were played most (bi-weekly).
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- Unlikely to do anything that requires substantial manual work
- Doesn't like to deal with e-mails
- Wants to be aware of new music while delegating input to system/others
Music Director Lana (Loud RockElectronica):
Lana does electronica (also known as RPM) at WMBR. Another music director, whom she referred to as "counting monkey", does all the play counts for her genre so she does not do the reporting. She'll sometimes make CDs out of music she receives digitally, in which case she has to do all the printing herself (e.g. album art, track list). In addition, she needs to do the labeling depending on genre (these labels are placed on the CD spine so they're visible in the physical library at a glance, e.g. black stripe represents electronic elements, green dot represents 60s oriented, yellow dot is heavy metal, red dot is noisy). About nine times out of ten she thinks the music she receives digitally is worth burning to CD and putting in the library, about one out of twenty times does she actually do so.
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